Re: [whatwg] alternate ids for elements

On 2014-12-03 15:02, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
> 2014-12-03, 15:49, Julian Reschke wrote:
>
>> I have a use case where a certain location in a document can have two
>> anchors (or even more). For instance, in a spec, the author may have
>> specified an anchor, but a section-number based anchor is required as
>> well.
>
> Can you elaborate on that? Why cannot you use the same id attribute
> value in all references to an element?

1.) An author-supplied anchor may change, but you want to preserve 
existing "deep" links from other documents.

2.) You may want to support anchors based on section numbers which will 
allow other parties to link to a specific section of the document while 
only knowing the section number and a template (think references to 
sections numbers in RFCs over on tools.ietf.org).

>> How about a new attribute "alt-ids" which would take a space-separated
>> list of additional anchors?
>
> What would be the use of such additional identifiers?

See above. Essentially aliases for anchors.

> The only thing I can imagine right now is a situation where you have an
> existing id attribute and references to it all around but now need to
> refer from a context that imposes its own restrictions on the syntax.
> Say, you have id="παράδειγμα" and you need to refer to the element using
> a URL like http://example.com/foo.html#παράδειγμ" but cannot because
> the URL needs to be used in an environment where Greek letters cannot be
> used. But this sounds like a rather rare occasion.

It's yet another use case that could be addressed that way.

Best regards, Julian

Received on Wednesday, 3 December 2014 14:16:21 UTC